F.A.

Decorations

The streamers from the surprise party had not yet been taped to the underside of the deck when they were left out. The storm surprised us. I missed it all because I had to work late. I don't know how much I had to work. Maybe I just didn't feel like going to the party. When I came home, I saw so many of the decorations battered. The rain made them bleed their colors. It was the opposite of summer snowballs and the way the flavors blossomed inside the shaved ice, getting deeper and darker as the attendant poured. I knew nothing was reusable. The party must have moved indoors without the festive good cheer. I tried to imagine her disappointment. Standing here under the deck down by the basement door, I thought of something that I would like to say to her. Something…the letters for happy birthday now looking like swollen rice noodles…something that would have connected the end of one point to the beginning of another. I remember the parties we had when we were younger and the neighbors would bring their chairs and we would all sit in the backyard when it was unfenced and huge, and the children would catch fireflies in the glass Coke bottles. I am sad to see that this party was not what she wanted. We didn't have decorations for those summer parties. They just happened. But those were many years ago when the days were much longer and the rain didn't get us quite so wet. I am alone. The last person to the party. The distance in my mind. She is probably upstairs, wrapped up in the white linen sheets. I'm sure there's food left in the refrigerator. That's how long it took me to get home. Long enough for her to erase it all and pack it into plastic. I guess it was still raining when she finally decided to go to bed, and so she left everything out here like this for me to clean. I'll get it in the morning. I'm hungry and I'm tired. And even though it stopped raining, I can't think of that thing that I wanted to say to her. I'm hoping it will pop into my head soon so that when I crawl into bed I might have something nice to say to her if she wakes up and asks me why I was late.

The Tiger

I remember you took me camping once in October in the woods where your parents used to take you and all of your siblings when you were all kids. I had never camped. I wasn't afraid of the wildlife or the darkness or the endless noise. I was afraid of you. I remember after you built the fire and we unfolded the old chairs, your eyes glowed golden. I know it was the fire, but still it was like you were a black and white photo with eyes only in terrifying color. Who made you? What creature could have created you? At that time I had been on the earth for almost 40 years, and I had never seen anyone like you. Your face was so balanced. One cheekbone matched the other. Your nose cut through the dark perfectly and then died in a little arrow-point. Your teeth glowed like coconut meat, and when you were silent they were hidden perfectly behind your cherry black lips.

There was a rain so light it seemed polite. You didn't even put your hood up. And when I looked up at the sky, I saw the stars being thrown at us. Like the sky was surrendering to you. I couldn't blame it. I certainly wanted to put my hands on the earth before you, palms up. I knew that you would eventually spill out of the chair, and I wanted to catch every drop of you. Because I could not imagine any of you going to waste. I could not imagine the earth swallowing you before I had the chance.

The Beach

The tractors seem silent because we are up so high in this holiday resort. They clean the sand while the fluorescent white foam of the ocean leaks in and disappears. Come out here, my love,  and look at it with me. It is our vacation, but the ocean is here forever. And it won't care when we leave. Just sit here and see it with me. Wrap the blanket from the back of the couch around your dogwood shoulders. I'm not asking you to speak. You can close your eyes and lean on your knees, but at least listen. You might even hear the moon slipping like a coin through the metal sheet of the night sky. It is a desperate sound not unlike the endless sad sound of the quarters falling into the games at the arcade.

At Normandy, Salinger had not yet written the things that would ring in the ears and fill the hearts of generations. He held a rifle and felt the spray of the English Channel that likely was just as nervous as every soldier who was about to live or die by running through it. Sitting here with you I wish there was a way to call the dead Salinger and speak to him like a friend the way Caulfield put it. But your mouthless eyes will have to be enough for me to keep me from feeling so totally alone. You stare at me, and I stare at the beach over the railing like it is the mouth of a landing craft. But I am too far away to storm the Nazis. And there is nothing violent on the empty beach. The only danger for me is here. Days where you have disappeared from me, and I only wish I could throw you into the ocean and let the salt water baptize you into loving me again.

It is the same damn ocean who used to cradle me as a boy, and I would swim out into it on a rented raft and pretend that we were warrior enemies. We would fight the fight that kept me in the sun and in the undertow for hours and hours until my father had to shout from the shore for me to come back. But now the ocean has forgotten. Or he is just too busy to remember me because now my heart is not small and swollen with the imagination of childhood. It has been bent and dented and it will never be as valuable as it once was. To the ocean I am just a body to be tossed or lost forever along the sandy bottom of its black oblivion.

My love, I cannot say these words to you because it's clear your ears have been folded and packed like the umbrellas we didn't rent on the beach that we never visited together. But be true. Come to me. There is literally less than a foot between us. I made the chairs close enough so that if you wanted to reach out to me you could. There is still a fantasy for us waiting in the ocean. Even now we could walk down the stairs and across the boardwalk. We could charge through the sand and find ourselves in the water. It's not safe to swim without the lifeguard but it doesn't mean we can't do it. When there is enough pain you can float for hours and not drown. And if you let me hold you, my love, I will make us into a ship or a boat and we will rise and fall with the tide that doesn't stop just because the sun has gone down. We could live above the waves or even die together if the fighting gets to be too desperate for us.

The Love

Song

I want to take you out when the night is flat like a sheet that's been pinned to a wall. I want to take you to a bar where you can feel the crunch of peanut shells under your feet. Where it's possible that the people around you are not going home when the bar closes but rather will rent rooms or fool around in cars. I don't want you to ask me “what is it?” Let's just go. Let's go to these places. Even if we wind up in the rooms with the old women who look at us like we're mad. I'll hold your hand and pull you through, and we'll pretend that they're not clucking at us. We're not far from the water. The air is a cat that walks around on soft paws, it's fur rotten from months of neglect. You can smell it wherever you go but still it thrills you when you see it leap.

Don't worry, my love. We've got time. We can waste the evening because there will be time for us to do the things that we have to do. Tomorrow. There will be time to make so many mistakes and then fix them. We should make the mistakes and then stop and get a Big Mac. Hell, maybe I’ll eat two.

Let the old women talk. Their voices are uselessly low.

When I walk ahead of you downstairs you can see that I'm losing my hair. I don't mind. Because when I turn around, you fall into me. And your arms are long. Let's take a chance? Let's dare to make tonight ours. I want to put my foot into the street and watch the city quiver.

I had a chance to do this once before and I didn't. I stood still. When I filled a teaspoon, I made sure I didn’t spill a drop. I was careful. Let's not be that way. Let's be naked. Let's let things spill. Not just because it makes sex easy. Let's be naked because that's the way we were born.

I was at the university. I let them look me up and down. I know what it feels like. And as you start what I stopped so long ago, let me squeeze your hand. Let me tell you what no one told me. Or if they told me, I certainly wasn't listening. Because they had me on a table. They pinned me to the desk. I wrote beautifully in the long hand that they taught me at my school. A way of writing that is strange to you. Because you can delete. You can change your sentences in seconds. So do it. Cut it up and cut it out. Do something new. Write something else. You don't have to be stuck with the things you said. Kick them in the eye. Don't let them look at you that way.

These places where I want to take you, I've been to these places, too. I've come here at the end of my work days. I've smoked. I don't know if I deserve to be anything but the blind crab at the bottom of the ocean. I have a tough time making up my mind. But you know that. You've seen that from me. And so tonight I'm trying to be anything but the ragged claws scuttling on the sandy bottom of the sea.

In the morning we can come back here and stretch ourselves like shadows on the floor. We can be the number 11. From our fingertips to our toes, we can become a prime number. Together.

I had my doubts. Before I met you, I heard the voices of women who tried to tell me that I should turn this way or roll that way or sleep more quietly. I've had my opportunity to celebrate and to mourn. I don't know what I'm doing. I can't predict the future. I know that when we sit in that corner booth near the jukebox and you drink your dark beer, I feel a little less tragic. I stop staring at the dagger, and I actually enjoy the sound of your smile.

I don't know if it's worth it. I don't know if this love affair of ours is worth it. I mean there are voices. A lot of voices. Some of them have pulled knives out of their boots and decided to cut the ropes. I can feel myself floating loose through the universe because those people who were once harbors to me are now storms. They are enemies. Is that all it takes? One voice from the past telling me that I'm a sinner? I won't lie. They have rattled around inside my brain, but when I am not sitting next to you in the Uber or on the bench by the side of the harbor, I do hear them. Because what if they're right? What if they see what I see and still say it’s wrong?

I have had others before you.  They would lie beside me and eventually get up, walking into the front room with a blanket and the white glow of a snow storm.  They would say to the sparkling night, “that’s not what I meant.”  And they would turn with tears, and I could feel the radiator fail. Despite their transformation, I couldn’t stop my mouth from objecting. My poetry would wither. They left. They all left.

My voice was a light that threw the still images of my mind on the wall that always faced the brown eyes and the down hair of the arms that hugged the knees and preferred making love to the door and not me. I spoke. I argued. And every time they turned away from the wall and said so quietly, “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant, at all.”

I live with the truth that I’m sad.  I see the smiles and costumes of the happiest princes, and I envy their choices.  I have no choice.  My head slips. I regret my arms and legs.  I am a fool. A dropout.  I am double your age.  I do my job usefully, but you are a candle.  We have light because you still burn.  My light went out years ago. I fumper in my dark. 

I am at a loss over my hair.  It escapes and leaves behind old age. It tilts my scales and makes the creases in my face. You can get lost in my wrinkles. I bought a new soap and ordered a treatment for my expanding scalp. My belt has reached the last notch. Should I cut a new hole? 

I can walk to the water and sit on the bench like an old man, watching for the young (but not too young) girls. They are bent over with laughs and they travel in packs.  You could be one of them, but these girls don’t see me.  And they won’t. If you were here, embroidered with your friends, you wouldn’t see me either. We are drunk and asleep on the floor of your apartment, but soon the city’s yawning will wake us. When you blink at me I am sure you will wonder… how did he get so old without any warning? I won’t have an answer. I’ll just let the day wrap me up and shuttle me through the city like an Arabian prince on a flying carpet. 

أنا أغرق.    أنا أغرق

Save me.

Musée des

Beaux Arts

You lost a brother. I know there's a part of your heart that goes untouched and no matter how much I circle around and try to find my way, it's made of bricks now. It's not available for me or my amateur love. It was an unexpected thing, I know that. And the funeral that followed was something you had to help organize because your parents had rotted and could not hold the weight of it all. You and I are the same age, and I know at the time that you were piling the stones and pebbles around the body of your brother, I was lost in my own tragedy. I had a death in a way when my first wife filled our living room with accusations and her relentless decision to leave me. That was on the anniversary of my father's death. She could not let me mourn for one day longer. She tore the black from me and made a hole and pushed me into it. I stayed there for years and years. And while I was grieving my losses, you were doing your best to forget his decay. It makes me think of a lesson I taught my seventh graders not long after my marriage was erased. Of course I captured the boys just the way the Minotaur was held in the nasty twisting corridors of the labyrinth. And they found some identity with Icarus and his ridiculous inability to listen to his father's only warning. When Icarus flies to the Sun, one of my students asked me if he was an idiot. I said no. He's not. He just didn't listen. I'm certain that my ex-wife would have called me an idiot. I suffered from the same problem as Icarus. For me flying to the Sun wasn't about the joy of being able to fly. It was about the sun’s beauty. Because for me the sun has always been a woman. She had her own tragic history, the death of someone so young. He fell right in front of her.  She must have seen his white legs disappear into the green sea. I saw you in the middle of a memory somewhere between the old Masters and the sculpture garden at the museum. You had your own students to escort across the ocean to Europe where all the best painters lived and died. I was told to sip beauty, but I didn’t listen.  I opened my mouth as you crossed before me, and I swallowed you in giant greedy mouthfuls.

Man &

Wife

Polly's truck eats up the asphalt with the tiny rocks that spill out of your driveway into the street. We are sleeping in your mother's bed. The moon outside is tender and on the verge of tears, almost like a widow or a loon from Parson's lake. All night my arm's numb and wrapped tightly around your dressed waist. You fell asleep four times. I could tell because I counted breath. You were in your twenties and I held my glass tight enough to crush it. I drank to get drunk for the both of us, but you turned several bottles of Moscato inside out. I was ashamed to be so shy, and my face was red and I couldn't do much more than laugh and stumble. But your eyes weren't afraid to swallow mine, and every time you spoke you made poetry, unrhymed and honest.

Now, 12 years later, you turn your back and I can do equations on the white linen of your nightgown. You hold your pillow to your stomach like an unborn baby, and your anger swells your fists and makes your cheeks sweaty like wet apples. You're angry at me. It's even louder in your sleep because you went to bed without saying good night. The absence of those tiny words crashes down on me like the displeasure of Vesuvius. It's the quiet before the ashy quilt, but it's not quiet enough for me to find a way to fall asleep with you.

Love

and a

Question

The stranger knocked on the door with a soft hand. Had I not been staring at “my wife” so intently I might not have heard him. Opening the door,  I saw his blackness against the blackness of night, and it really was only his voice that made him stand out to me. "It's very late and I've had a tough time finding the road and getting myself back." I looked over his shoulder. The road disappeared into the nothingness where there were no lights filling the windows of the dark homes. "I really have nowhere to stay."  It was late. I said "let me look up at the sky, and we'll  see how much light there is for you." The leaves were tattered and thin. Winter would take them soon.

Behind me I knew she was leaning into the mirror, lost in the worry that autumn was almost gone. She dreaded winter, And I could feel her fear from anywhere in the house. We were newly married, and now I would have my chance to see what life was truly like with this woman who could find silence in the dim reflection of herself.

She seemed ready for bed from the minute we got home hours after the ceremony. She had wandered upstairs and down, dressed in the nothingness that she would wear to sleep that night. Half naked. Half gym shorts. Her hair had escaped from the elaborate contraption that she had pinned to the top of her head. Wherever she put the wedding dress, I would never see it again for all the years that we would be married. 

There was something that glowed red that was plugged into the bathroom wall, and because she had not turned on the lights her skin had changed colors and she looked not unlike a stop signal. I could only imagine how this stranger was affected by her shirtlessness.

If he had asked for food or a pint of gin, I would have gladly packed up a bag. But what type of man would want to bring sorrow to the newly married rooms of a newly married couple on the first evening of their newly married life? I leaned into the door. It would have slammed if I let it. But I couldn't. Instead the three of us pondered the blackness that surrounded us as the winter forced me to make the first grown up decision of my newly adult life.

Author’s Note:

All stories were also inspired by some of my favorite poems. The poems are:

“Storm Windows” by Howard Nemerov; “The Tyger” by William Blake; “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot; “Musée des Beaux Arts” by WH Auden; “Man and Wife” by Robert Lowell; “Love and a Question” by Robert Frost